Love Is All aren't shy about interrupting each other. On their debut album, Nine Times That Same Song, the band's voices talk-talk-talk-talk all at once: Josephine Olausson's scratchy chirps and dreamy keyboards, Nicholaus Sparding's barbed guitars, Fredrik Eriksson's clamorous saxophone, Markus Görsch's subterranean dance-party drums, and Johan Lindwall's damaged bass bounce. It stands to reason, then, that each of the Swedish quintet's members has something to say about the making of one of a young 2006's early best-of-list candidates.

Formed out of the ashes of indie pop group Girlfrendo, Love Is All continue to approach topics like relationships with a likeably twee unabashedness. But the songs share a delirious raggedness, further bedraggled by Eriksson's sax skronkisms. And love isn't all: There's also restlessness, claustrophobia, and the feeling of having watched too much TV. After an initial delay, Nine Times That Same Song finally received U.S. distribution last month. The band is returning to tour soon, as well. Maybe love doesn't envy, doesn't boast (kiss the bride), but Love Is All boast an enviable success story of DIY principles and sloppy, gorgeous pop. This is it.

Pitchfork: How many of you were in Girlfrendo? I like what I've heard of that band, too.

Josephine Olausson: Me and Nicholaus were in Girlfrendo pretty much from the start. And then Markus joined on drums towards the end.

Markus Görsch: I was only in the band for the last year, and only on one 7". We went to the U.S. twice. This is how we met Kevin Pedersen of What's Your Rupture. We all-- eight or nine people-- stayed in his room in a dorm on Broome Street. The toilet was flooded after two days, it was crazy.

Johan Lindwall: I never played with Girlfrendo, except for a short tambourine appearance on a live show at a Beno-festival in Norrköping. I totally smashed my hand, couldn't use it for days.

Pitchfork: So what happened to Girlfrendo? How did Love Is All come about?

Josephine: One night we all went out for a beer after practice, and had a talk and then, all of a sudden, we had just decided to split up. It was hardly out of the blue, but not really anything that was planned either.

Markus: This was after a depressing rehearsal in a freezing cold factory building, so all of us were in a kind of "oh fuck it" mood. But on our way home, Josephine, Nicke, and I started talking about starting a new band, this time in a practice space with central heating.

Johan: [I recorded] a 7" single with Nicke and Josephine [a side project called Cat Skills] during their Girlfrendo years. I hooked up with Nicke, Markus, and Josephine in 2002, I guess, after listening to a demo tape in Nicke's Walkman at a local bar in Gothenburg. I'd never played bass before, except for that one time on the Cat Skills 7".

Pitchfork: What's the main difference between Love Is All and Girlfrendo, style-wise?

Markus: When we started LIA, Josephine told me I must never play on the hi-hat, instead make as much noise on the toms as possible. She used to be very upset and hide my hi-hat.

Pitchfork: The saxophone is really underutilized in a lot of indie-type music these days-- bad associations with 1980s power ballads, I guess, or else ska. Why'd you decide to make the sax such an integral part of your sound?

Josephine: I've been really into Kleenex and Essential Logic and all those bands forever and I really liked the way they used the saxophone. And then someone played me James Chance and I loved it. So when I heard about Fredrik playing the saxophone, it just seemed like the most perfect idea ever. Still does.

Markus: We were recording our second 7" and wanted a sax on "Spinning & Scratching". I knew Fredrik from music school, and I knew he was the kind of sax player that could make sounds like Chance or Pharaoh Sanders. At that session we "accidentally" wrote and recorded "Make Out Fall Out Make Up", and we discovered that Fredrik's sax was what we all had been missing.

Fredrik Eriksson: I think their idea was to get the ending [of "Spinning & Scratching"] even more chaotic. I rehearsed with them one night before the recording and ended up playing on like four songs. After we recorded the songs ["Spinning", "Make Out", "Ageing Had Never Been His Friend", and some others that didn't make it including a really calm version of "Turn the Radio Off"] they asked me if I wanted to play a gig they had in Gothenburg. After that, I sort of slipped into the band. I'm really into free jazz and I try to keep that chaotic, expressive untuned style but I don't know if I succeeded. But mostly we like to be like Roxy Music, still looking for an Eno to show up...

Markus: Woody Taylor, drummer of Comet Gain, is our Eno. He has mixed all our recordings, and our sound owes a lot to his crazy wall of sound/lo-fi ideas. Genius!

Pitchfork: You once said Love Is All might be "the slowest band ever," referring to your recording process. What did you mean?

Josephine: It usually takes us forever to be pleased with a song. For every new song we make there are at least 10 ideas that we've scrapped. I think it's because we all come from such different angles. I might have one way that I want the song to sound, Nicholaus has something completely different going on in his mind. And the same goes for Johan, Markus, and Fredrik.

Nicholaus Sparding: Most of the time I either already have a song and I put Josephine's lyrics to it, or I get lyrics from Josephine and I make a song inspired by the lyrics. Then we all arrange it together. Sometimes we improvise whole songs. The answer to why we are slow must be that we all have our duties outside the band-- for instance I've had two wonderful kids the past three years, and others have really challenging jobs.

Fredrik: The drums and bass decide which direction the song is going. And it just takes a lot of time to find the balance between the chaotic and the pop-thing. We still are changing details when we're playing. Maybe "Make Out" is static, and it didn't take more than an afternoon to make and record. I thought for a long time that we were going to re-record it. I just improvised. Both the saxes are first takes-- I was just thinking of what to play.

Nicholaus: When it comes to recording the songs I would say we are probably the fastest band in the world. Don't think we ever made more than three takes and we record everything ourselves.

Pitchfork: U.S. listeners first heard Love Is All when you released the single "Make Out Fall Out Make Up" in 2004. Tell me about recording that 7". What kind of reaction did you get once mp3 blogs started picking up on it?

Josephine: We recorded the songs-- like all our other songs-- in the practice space one weekend. It was picked as "Single of the Week" in NME and we got to do a Peel session thanks to it. It was all very exciting, but then I don't think we thought that much more about it. Suddenly it started appearing on all those blogs, which of course was cool.

Nicholaus: "Ageing Had Never Been His Friend" was a re-recording. It had already been out on an earlier 7". "Make Out" was actually done in an hour while recording the other songs: Josephine brought some lyrics, I made a simple melody for the vocals together with some chords and then Markus threw rocks on the drums and everything got so much better. "Spinning & Scratching" was a slow ballad from the beginning! That 7" was done in a day or two. Woody from Comet Gain did the mixing and we were amazed by the result.

Fredrik: There was some plan of making a split with Comet Gain. But somehow we ended up with a good three-song EP. We made like 600 copies, half of them sold here in Sweden on our own label, Philosophy of the World, and half of them on What's Your Rupture?. Some liked it and some more copies were made.

Pitchfork: How about the Felt Tip EP? How and when did that one come about?

Josephine: "Felt Tip" is one of our oldest songs. We made it back when the band was only me, Markus, and Nicholaus. Nicke used to play the keyboards back then. A few years later we decided to try and re-record it (there is an old four-track recording of it that is slightly different). We did that one too in the practice space. And then a kid from Gothenburg put it out on his label, Smashing Time. It sold quite a lot in one store here in town, but besides that we didn't think anyone noticed it.

Nicholaus: "Felt Tip" is, I think, our second song ever. During our Peel session we rearranged the first version and there was this obscure three-part monotone kind of on-and-on-going song. Probably our longest song ever. We were really happy about it and we recorded it together with "Talk" and "Busy Doing Nothing" (the first version). I don't know when but probably in the beginning of 2004. Woody did the mixing of "Felt Tip" and "Talk". "Busy" was done by a guy in Gothenburg. We weren't really pleased with it so Woody mastered it with an ongoing reverb throughout the whole song and put on some percussion and it changed shape.

Fredrik: "Felt Tip" is the best song we've made. Especially the early 4-track with just Markus, Nicke and Jo. That song made me love LIA before I joined. And it cost me $15 for taking the cab to their first show.

Pitchfork: Why did you settle on the album title Nine Times the Same Song? Obviously, it's a line from "Busy Doing Nothing", but beyond that?

Josephine: I kind of like that line. I like that there are 10 songs on the album, which might make people a little confused. And also, I was thinking that if anyone wanted to give it a bad review that would be one way of slagging it off.

Pitchfork: What music were you listening to while you were putting together 9 Times the Same Song? Life Without Buildings and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have been mentioned as influences-- are they?

Josephine: I have only heard Life Without Buildings once, I think. I've been meaning to download it, to find out what everyone is talking about. I think Fredrik is the only member of the band who knows what they sound like. I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but I'm not so sure they've influenced the band all that much. I really don't think that there are any clear influences to Love Is All. Everyone in the band listen to such different types of music and the way we end up sounding is just all coincidences.

Fredrik: We've never discussed what kind of band we wanna sound like. Maybe Roxy Music and the Vaselines.

Johan: I love the attitude in the basslines and the drums in Roxy Music, especially in their faster songs. I also have to admit that the basslines in Duran Duran are great.

Pitchfork: Your songs also really remind me of the drama of classic 1960s groups like the Shangri-Las.

Josephine: I love the Shangri-Las. They are probably my favorite girl group from that era. I like that whole telling-a-story type of lyrics. But I think that girl groups like Raincoats, the Slits, Mo-dettes, and others have meant more than any other bands to me.

Nicholaus: As a songwriter I'm not inspired by '60s girl groups at all. I like a lot of the bands but they don't make me wanna do it all over again in a new way or anything. I don't contemplate very much at all when writing songs. But I do believe that as soon as the others put their minds and talent to it, it changes into a mix of all of our different sources of inspiration. Someone in the band might be inspired by '60s girl groups and suddenly someone outside of the band (you for instance) will notice that.

I don't think we would sound the way we do if we simply said to ourselves: OK, let's do a Shangri-La's rip off, or a Roxy Music rip off. That's more the way Girlfrendo felt like-- in a good sense. With LIA we never decided what should be the band's favorite things. So it's always possible to do whatever someone's inspired by, if only for one day.

Pitchfork: Are the songs autobiographical?

Josephine: Some of them are really autobiographical, but those are mostly the ones that are frustrated, like "Spinning & Scratching", "Talk Talk Talk Talk", and "Turn the TV Off". Others are more just feelings I always have, like the feeling of trying too hard, being a stalker, waking up hungover knowing you've done things that were maybe not too clever. I can't really write about love being too straightforward. I prefer to take the role of being the less sympathetic, I think.

Pitchfork: You played at Don Hill's in New York City in November. The crowd seemed to love it, but how'd it go for you?

Josephine: It was incredible. That entire trip, all four shows, were amazingly fun to play. It was almost unreal to see all the people being into our music. I don't think we had any expectations like that. I still can't stop smiling just thinking about it.

Pitchfork: How does your live show differ from the record, which is already so ragged and lo-fi?

Nicholaus: It's louder and not as lo-fi, believe it or not. Live engineers are too good! But I like it.

Josephine: Every show is different. Sometimes we tend to mess up completely, being way too drunk or excited. We're not great fans of practicing, but I think we've just realized that it actually helps sometimes. Also, all our instruments are pretty crappy, so there is almost always something breaking. Another frustrating thing with Love Is All is that no one in the band has a driver's license, so we always have to depend on finding a driver when we're going some place to play. Or spend half of the money we've made taking taxis.

Fredrick: I think we sound best on small unpretentious stages. All our equipment is really bad so it often breaks and makes unwelcome sounds, which brings some edge to the shows.

Pitchfork: What other bands out there these days do you guys identify with?

Nicholaus: The bands don't exist. There are too many ways to do things, and everyone in the band doesn't come to [the same] conclusions.

Markus: We are good friends with Comet Gain and Aislers Set. I think both those bands have a very good attitude. And Cause Co-motion. Maybe CC especially. They are even slower than we when it comes to putting out new stuff. I can't say that I identify with any bands in Sweden, the scene is very... different here, more about getting laid or at least getting free drinks.